A Revival for Two Stalin-Era Hotels

The rivals were two of Moscow's "seven sisters"—Stalin-era skyscrapers built to celebrate Soviet victory in World War II and give the devastated capital a skyline fit for a superpower. Builders spared no expense. The towers for decades awed visitors, including Fidel Castro and other communist luminaries.

By the 1990s, the landmarks mirrored Russia's decay. A tawdry casino filled the Leningradskaya's vaulted banquet hall. The Ukraina's penthouse restaurant, its dumbwaiters disabled, was chopped into offices.

Today, the hotels are proud competitors again, each aiming to set new hospitality standards with a post-Soviet mix of grandeur, history and luxury.

The Leningradskaya was gutted and reopened as a Hilton in 2008. Earlier this year, the Ukraina reopened as a Radisson.

Ukraina officials sniff that the Leningradskaya is "three star-plus," while they have anointed themselves a "six" on the global five-star standard.

"We are one step up from them," says Ukraina general manager Wolfgang Nitschke. "We have a special cachet."

Leningradskaya officials insist they're in the same category.

Moscow preservationists were iron-fisted about the need to renew the Leningradskaya's brooding dark-wood and gold interiors, an aesthetic that might have pleased both Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. Preservation officials even ordered the hotel's Brezhnev-era red neon sign to remain.

The Leningradskaya's original reception desk also stayed, even though "it looked like some plywood that had been stained," recalls Colin Dunkley, a senior vice president at Interstate Hotels & Resorts in Arlington, Virginia, which manages the hotel under franchise from Hilton. "We proposed something more impressive, but we lost," Mr. Dunkley recalls.

Authorities nixed plans for a penthouse restaurant—no room for fire exits—so air conditioners claimed the top floor.

Underground, workers were freer to jack hammer a 12-meter pool out of a blast-proof ceiling and turn a bomb shelter into a beauty salon.

"We hope we don't need a bomb shelter any more," said spokeswoman Svetlana Kislova soon after the hotel opened.

Guest rooms, costing about $350 per night, were modernized. Five "historic suites" were restored to original Cold War warmth, with custom plasterwork and flowers hand-painted on columns. They've proved a hard sell, says hotel manager Joerg Beginen, at triple the regular room rate.

At the Ukraina, in part since the interior was less opulent than its competitor's, Moscow authorities granted its owners more leeway in dropping $300 million on their rehab. This included gutting the lobby to install a dozen boutiques offering diamonds and furs. Alexander Solovyev, a preservation architect who worked on both hotels, says regulators fought a constant battle against glitz.

"If the restoration experts hadn't been there, the whole inside would have been covered in gold," he says.

The Ukraina's penthouse, used for decades by police to monitor the city, was converted into a nest of restaurants commanding postcard views. Under the spire sits a special nook just for two—for wedding proposals and other romantic occasions.

Architects scrapped the basement room full of KGB eavesdropping gear. Nearby loading docks became a huge health club with an Olympic-size pool and cushioned-bamboo aerobic floors.

The Stalinist flourishes are proving popular with guests like Clyde D'Cruz, an executive with an agricultural company in Moline, Illinois, who visited the hotel for a conference. He says he found the decor both "intriguing" and "stunning."

The Ukraina boasts ten grades of guest rooms, averaging about $425 a night, and a duplex, 4,000-square foot presidential suite. With custom Italian furniture, a white player piano and bullet-proof glass, it has everything a visiting potentate could want. The hotel's toiletries even have their own scent from Penhaligon's, a London perfumer that Winston Churchill favored.

The hotel now captures two eras of Moscow. Outside the Rolls-Royce dealership crouches a Soviet-era bronze of a Red Army scout. At the front door, a sign warns that "entry with weapons is forbidden."

Leningradskaya architect Leonid Polyakov, who also designed some of Moscow's most ornate metro stations, adorned his hotel's interior with rare red stone trucked from near the Arctic Circle. He lit a stairwell with a 63-foot bronze chandelier that claimed to be the world's longest.

"My father was very absorbed in all this," recalls Mr. Polyakov's daughter, Anna. "He selected all the fabrics, matched the wallpaper, the drapes, the bedspreads to the old styles."

The Leningradskaya's unusual look is a big hit with foreign visitors, says Mr. Beginen, the manager. Russians, he adds, are more ambivalent about their history and "don't see it always as a positive."

That was also the reaction shortly after the hotel first opened, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had just begun his campaign of de-Stalinization. He singled out the Leningradskaya's ornamentation as unwanted architectural "excesses." Mr. Polyakov, the architect, was stripped of his Stalin Prize for the design and hounded from official jobs.

Designers then finishing the Ukraina, fearing reassignment to Siberia, scrambled to strip decorations and details from their plans. Restorers say they have tried to recreate the original vision from Stalin-era sketches and other clues. When workers ripped yellowed marble from the lobby, for example, they found the plain square columns were originally built to be round with ornate capitals. That's how they were rebuilt, blending with the new look.

"We might have overdone it in a few places," admits Vladimir Sheskin, who headed the renovation design team. "But I don't think so."

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